1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer simulation tools, electronics computer-aided design (CAD), machine learning techniques, data mining, and circuit design systems, and in particular, to a method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for quickly and efficiently analyzing a circuit design.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is difficult for anyone to design a circuit that performs the function well, and is optimized for multiple parameters such as cost, size, physical complexity, power, and other target design goal metrics. Existing tools may allow for some local optimization of design parameters, but these tools are cumbersome, have a learning curve/are difficult to understand or use, and are at times ineffective in helping the user reach their design goals.
Therefore, what is needed is a simple and quick way to obtain a rich set of qualitative analysis on a circuit design without needing huge computational resources and time commitments to complete comparative studies and a way for an electronic circuit designer to meet or exceed design goals with shorter design time and with more accurate and robust results, to be able to quickly perform verifications of manually designed circuits across multiple target metrics, and to be able to quickly access comparative results of a circuit using parts across different manufacturers so that the designer is automatically informed of the state of the art without needing to manually research the current state of the art. To better understand the problems of the prior art, a description of various circuit design techniques may be useful.
Designers of electrical circuits, and electronic circuit boards, since the advent of computer-based simulation and design tools, have used mainframe, and personal-computer-based software to perform electrical circuit and system design. In general, considering system architectures, existing design and simulation environments may be placed into one of two categories. Some programs (e.g., the PSPICE™ program), are installable on a user's machine, and can be run entirely within that single machine, with the full capability for design, simulation, and board layout. Such programs may be referred to as “standalone” or “client-only” design environments. Other programs use a client-server architecture, where simulations are run on a server, for example in universities or companies, and multiple clients connect to those servers for running simulations.
In today's world, for the first time, more mobile devices are being sold than standalone desktop or laptop computers. Users are using mobile smartphones, and tablet type devices in record numbers, and cloud-based computing has increased in popularity in such a way that it is no longer the domain of high-tech university laboratory experiments or supercomputer institutes. For example, with various tools (e.g., GOOGLE APPENGINE™, or AMAZON'S AWS™ services), even the most novice developers can have access to computing “clouds” for their own applications, even free of cost in some cases. This is a totally new capability, and totally new system designs are required to keep up with the pace of growth of users' needs for fast, scalable, always-connected applications and devices.
This new capability has given rise to new cloud-based electronic circuit design systems that may offer users the capability to move from a traditional desktop or laptop computer to a mobile device, with the same electronic design capabilities on both systems. Files in such design systems may be saved on back-end servers in a user's own directory, and computationally-intensive circuit simulations were carried out in the cloud. This recent change marked a new era in electronic circuit design, and physical printed circuit board manufacturing soon followed. Not only did circuit design and simulation move from a client-only system to a client-server system, but it also became social, where thousands of users could potentially have the ability to contribute and benefit from shared resources within the circuit design toolset. In these short few years the landscape of electronic design has changed dramatically.
However, to date, none of the systems have taken advantage of the vast amount of data that could be harnessed by the existence of such a system.